The Good Soldier Svejk

Fine poem, ‘The Hoopoe’, by Justin Quinn in today’s TLS. It begins by remembering a political murder in the Czech Republic and the assassin’s getting away it scot-free, before taking a sudden and unexpected ornithological turn:

The hitman, he gets rich
and lives beyond the scope
of the curious and the keen

much like the hoopoe which
is native throughout Europe
and nowhere to be seen.

Is it not marvellous the way he gets to the end like that without a single comma? And indeed, I’ve never seen a hoopoe, though I did spy a fine jay the other afternoon on Petřin hill in Prague, a photo of which I’ll post anon. Not the least of the pleasures of being in Prague was reading, at last, Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, or ‘Schweik’ as my antiquated Penguin would have it. ‘He did various odd jobs as a journalist and soon became known as a comic character and a practical joker, who was fond of associating with the devotees of taverns’, runs the back-cover biography. Could it be because of their experience of being the coachmen and valets of empire that authority figures in Hašek and Hrabal (whom he resembles closely) are made to seem so innately ridiculous? What better recipe for comedy, in both authors, than success through, rather than in spite of, stupidity? How endlessly amusing characters like the ‘eminent booby’ Colonel Friedrich Klaus von Zillergut with his addiction to explaining what things such as postage stamps and windows are (‘Do you know what a ditch is? A ditch is a sort of cavity dug by a gang of labourers’), and who dies when he steps into the road to explain what a footpath is. How I laughed when the inn-keeper was hauled away for sedition for allowing flies to shit on the emperor’s portrait behind the bar, and Švejk finds himself arrested and then hauled off to a lunatic asylum for shouting ‘Long live the emperor!’ in public.

I heard a most amusing paper at the Prague James Joyce conference out there (and still going on) by Paul Fagan, applying Gricean linguistic theories to Finnegans Wake, specifically the four maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner, failure to observe any of which leads to conversational ‘ligatures’, and the comic misunderstandings these in turn generate. But Švejk too turns the smallest conversational exchange into a Gricean ligature. ‘How long have you been working on the railway?’, he asks a worker after a Father Dougal-like moment in which a discussion of the importance of not pulling the communication cord on the train leads to, surprise surprise, the pulling of the communication cord. Then:

As the railwayman did not reply, Schweik proceeded to explain that he had known a certain Frantisek Mlicek of Uhrineves near Prague who had also pulled an emergency brake and it had so scared him that he had lost his speech for a fortnight and only recovered it when he was paying a visit to a gardener named Vanek at Hostivar, and had a fight with somewhere there. ‘That happened’, added Schweik, ‘in May, 1912’.

Or consider the exchange with his landlady on that perennial Czech theme of defenestration:

‘If you want to jump out of the window’, said Schweik, ‘go into the bedroom. I’ve opened the window for you. I wouldn’t advise you to jump out of the kitchen window, because if you did, you’d fall into the roses in the garden and squash them and then you’d have to pay for them. If you jump out of the bedroom window, you’ll land nicely on the pavement, and if you’re lucky, you’ll break your neck. If your luck’s out, you’ll just break all your ribs, arms and legs, and then it’ll cost you a pretty penny in the hospital.’

I love the knockabout picaresque fatalism of all this, the endless cock-and-bull stories, the hero’s obliviousness of all that’s going on around him, the beery sensuality and pub philosophising. This is more or less my worldview, my idea of how to spend my life writ large, I suppose, one amusing and quite possibly pointless distraction after another. And I’m still only halfway through the book. And don’t you just love Joseph Lada’s illustrations too.

If you want a good place to feel Hašekian or Hrabalaisian in Prague these days, or to maltreat yourself to your health’s contempt, as the Wake puts it (thanks Paul: your paper was fantastic), you could do a lot worse than here. I liked the dark Herold and the house Rauchbier, but stopped sadly just short of double-figures. That’s a mistake I won’t make the next time.

The World Cup

Last-minute recruitment of Jamie Carragher adds crucial tournament early exit experience to England squad.

Arizona sheriff patrolling half-way line against vague possibility of USA-Mexico tie, has ‘ways’ of dealing with ‘you folks’ back home.

FIFA cave in to Irish demands, force Thierry Henry to celebrate all goals with half-hearted somersault and give post-match interview in Tallaght accent, and enough already, you big cry-babies.

Argentina eyeing immediate invasion of small offshore islands of Brazil/Holland/North Korea/whoever after embarrassing quarter-final exit.

UN imposes sanctions on North Korean ‘nuclear’ sub jokes.

Slovakian FA offers players free consonants for life in event of victory.

Big lumbering German bloke ‘one of the more attractive continental defensive midfielders we’ve seen in recent years’.

Rio Ferninand ‘proverbialled’ over last-minute injury to whatever, innit.

Nigerian fan in crowd’s skin actually is green, is jumping up and down in spasms of embarrassment.

Neo-fascist-garbage-spouting, heavily-tattooed Italian has something very, very important to say to his mother/that model he’s banging.

Seventy-two per cent of Brazilian breasts now swaying in time to Kaka’s dinking runs on goal.

‘He knows what it means to them’, commentator says of robotic Swedish playboy mercenary Sven Goran Eriksson as he completes ‘lucky’ glasses-adjusting routine during Ivory Coast national anthem.

Middlesborough/Stoke/whoever fans will ‘need no reminding of’/‘know all about’ some Honduran/Greek/Slovenian who was useless on the wing for them before he got sold/put down, whenever that was, isn’t Harry Hill on ITV now?

Drinking carpet cleaner/stabbing self in eye suddenly more attractive than listening to Alan Shearer’s explanation of ‘previous’ to Uruguay-Denmark ‘grudge’ match ONE SECOND LONGER.

An Unofficial Roy Fisher

What a pleasure to see, never mind be in Peter Robinson’s An Unofficial Roy Fisher from Shearsman, a collection of tribute poems, collected stray reviews and essays, and uncollected poems to, on and by the man himself, who turns eighty on 11 June. Among the contributing poets are August Kleinzahler, R.F. Langley, Angela Leighton, and Peter Didsbury, who contributes ‘A Closing Prospect’, which waxes suburban-eschatological:

I think I could become quite passionate about hedgerows.
The thought seems to function
as an acceptance of things as they are,
which is incomprehensible
(and perhaps irrevocable) (...).

Richard Price considers Fisher’s alphabet-inspired collaboration with artist Ronald King, The Half-Year Letters, Peter Makin comes enjoyably to grief trying to provide map co-ordinates for where exactly Fisher stands in the literary landscape (‘I would like to think that Fisher’s position stands on mysterious demarcations that are so low-contrast as to be almost imperceptible’), his colleague Sue Stanford from the Birmingham Temporary Day College of Education supplies the information that his other colleagues back then (60s) included teachers called Attracta McCrudden, Concepta O’Shaughnessy and Avril Shufflebottom, and Ralph Pite writes on Fisher and water. And then there are the uncollected poems. Despite the presence of an updated bibliography by Derek Slade, there are no hints as to these items’ provenance or dates, and I’m guessing there is no crossover between them and the work about to be published by Bloodaxe in his new collection Standard Midland, but one poem I’ve now read and reread since getting the book yesterday is ‘Division of Labour’, which has been astonishing the brickwork here and then some:

I saw the dustmen drink the light
And remain dry;
I saw the grey wagon of dessication,
While the day raced in rivulets all about it,
Crawling along the gutter like a blind dog (...)

With a slight return thereof in the poem’s last three lines:

I saw the dustmen drinking light
And the grey wagon of dessication
crawl in the gutter like a blind dog.

{Ends}

I hope my prose contributions go some way to explaining my enormous debt to Fisher, and the whole gamut of possibilities I recognised in his work, and failed to recognise in so much of the rest of my reading, at the time. The poem I contribute to the book certainly comes, if not directly, then by a very self-conscious commodius vicus of recirculation, from the Fisher of City, A Furnace, The Cut Pages, and more, much more. Happy birthday, Mr Fisher.

Coming Attractions

An image from Hide, a collaborative book involving poetry, prose, photography and painting, due to be launched at this year’s Humber Mouth Literature Festival in a few weeks. Don’t you love a good waxwing. Place your orders now!

Louisiana Laughing Gull Wondering What It's Meant to Find So Funny

Rafa Departs

‘I would like to thank Stevie/Nando/Jamie/whatever that guy’s name was I paid ten million quid for any never played, because he does always does a good game for asssss.’

Plans for last four finish in next year’s League Cup in ashes.

Drives to Manchester for valedictory refusal of handshake with/tetchy press-conference attack on Alex Ferguson.

Yes there is still time to be appointed manager of the UAE and take them of the World Cup in the first round.

As-yet Unnamed New Manager Must Go!/As-Yet Unnamed New Manager Victim of Anti-Liverpool Media Vendetta.

Steven Gerrard’s forehead crease setting upped two more notches.

Fernando Torres adjusts hair-gel setting, at Spain World Cup camp, to ‘¿Estoy molestado?’

Stevie working flat-out on fabricating ‘fraught’ relationship (hint hint Real Madrid) with as-yet unnamed new manager.

Rafa’s pitchside notes finally unveiled as lesbian detective novel set in Belgium; missed the Istanbul penalty shoot-out while he worked on cliff-hanger ending to chapter seven.

Hicks and Gillett still not sure who that guy was.

25/5/05 – YNWA – ¡Vaya con Dios, Rafa!

Smudge

Tomfoolery of Poetry

Douglas Dunn’s Rumoured City¸ a Bloodaxe anthology of poets from Hull with a tersely memorable introduction by Philip Larkin, appeared in 1982. Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens have now co-edited a successor anthology, Old City, New Rumours (Five Leaves Press, £7.99).

The contributors are as follows: Peter Didsbury, Douglas Dunn, Andy Fletcher, Tony Flynn, Cliff Forshaw, Sam Gardiner, Chris Greenhalgh, Ian Gregson, T.F. Griffin, Douglas Houston, Margot K. Juby, David Kennedy, Angela Leighton, Frances Leviston, Roger McGough, Andrew Motion, Grace Nichols, Sean O’Brien, Caitríona O’Reilly, Ian Parks, Tom Paulin, Tony Petch, Genny Rahtz, Frank Redpath, Christopher Reid, Carol Rumens, Maurice Rutherford, DW, Susan Wicks.

Being in the book as I am it’s not for me to speak up on its behalf, other than to say how gratifying it is that a place so easily overlooked or written off by those who have never been should have hosted and nudged into being so much writing, some at least of it very good.

People put the oddest things in biographical notes though. Here is Margot K. Juby: ‘For several years now Margot has taken no part in the tomfoolery of poetry. She prefers to spend her time in revisionist research into the life of Gilles de Rais, who was re-tried and acquitted in 1992.’

More enviably, Frances Leviston ‘has worked as a librarian and a snowboarding instructor.’

As an inducement for you to go purchase the book let me reproduce ‘Ring’ by the always excellent Sam Gardiner(Portadown-born, Grimsby-resident, but Hull architect in his time).

Ring me, she said, years ago, before this ring,
This remembering. Soon she was coming round
And round, and the polarity was changing
From change in the air to bodies on the ground,
Bodies only, carefree and freestyle night
After night, shocked at not being appalled
At the shock of our animality, the feral cries;
That cry from the bathroom: your Hot is cold!
Cold hands in those days couldn’t stop her
Stopping my blues guitar. No No, she’d moan
And as two noes make one yes I did, never
Expecting ever hand in hand to turn to arm in
Arm, to tongue in cheek. The old fairground
Is fair game for ghosts, white stars hanging
Unchanged, while merrily we two go round
And round, the light catching her ring.

{Ends}

Earlier disclaimer aside, I am of course very pleased to be in Old City, New Rumours and heartily recommend it.

The Cow May Be My Future

Lucie Brock-Broido’s work may be the poetry equivalent of slow food, with her current tally standing at three books since 1988, namely A Hunger, The Master Letters and Trouble in Mind. Still, it’s good to see a generous selection of them published by Carcanet as Soul Keeping Company, but what takes my eye straight away are two notes, both to poems from A Hunger. One is to ‘Elective Mutes’, and tells us the poem is narrated by June Gibbons, as well as summarizing her story and that of her identical twin Jennifer.

As the sisters grew up together, they became more and more detached from the real world, eventually living and speaking in an invented world of poems, novels, and diaries based on the lives and rituals of their dolls. Eventually, their fantasies and languages became more symbiotic and more pathological. As they became impossibly and progressively intertwined and encoded, they began to turn on one another; they became arsonists, and eventually [third time now!], they began to think of murdering one another. Now in their twenties, they are imprisoned in Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane.

{Quotation ends}

The twins remained at Broadmoor for 14 years. Jennifer mysteriously died or viral myocarditis within hours of leaving Broadmoor in 1993. June now lives in Wales and continues to write.

The other note that took my fancy is to the poem ‘The Future as a Cow’, and quotes the words of former Bridgeport basketball player Manute Bol. The subject is his Sudanese background:

My father was a farmer. Not a big farmer. He made some money. He sold potatoes and tomatoes. He had about 150 cows... When I want to get married to some girl, and her father says, ‘I want 100 cows’, what are you going to do if you don’t have the cows? That’s why you keep cows. I took care of the cows. I looked for animals that would like to kill the cows. Lions, hyenas. Sometimes I talk out loud to keep them away... Right now I play ball. I can stay here in this country and I don’t have to sell my cows, because I like the cows like my father liked them. I’m going to school right now. I play now. I can’t say the future is not a cow. The cow may be my future. I don’t know.

{Quotation ends}

Manute Bol is 7’7” and is currently the brand ambassador for Ethiopian Airlines.

Giant Kitteh

Many thanks to Silver Fox for alerting me to this stirring example of remedial topiary around the corner from the post office on Chanterlands Avenue here in Hull.

And So to Sea

Graffiti

Choughs' Nests, The Lizard

Percy at the Window

Zennor Mermaid

Bubo Bubo

Baby Owls

Semaphore

A ship in a bottle, a ship in a bulb.
My love the lighthouse-keeper sleeps
in a circular bed, his toes almost

touching his head, and I his wife
dance by the shore, a flag in each hand.
He watches me from inside the storm,

and knows the code. Red,
yellow, red: I found your toothbrush,
the swallows have fledged. The light

has a god’s all-powerful whimsy –
flashing, occulting, isophase –
and he’s the man will catch fish with a kite,

and knit me a chough’s red beak
on a jumper. Come the worst
of the swells, relief is impossible:

where is the light to warn the man
inside the light and under the sea’s
own tongue? When they saw

the Flannans lamp dark and no one
to greet them, the search party
knew the island unmanned,

its savage tideline notional
henceforth, up in the air.
I too am carried away,

who have gone nowhere.
But, o, he’s the man will come
back to me, winched over

the waves with his jigsaws done
to a total absence of potted meat,
to where no spray leeches into our bed.

More Than Usually Revolting Depravity

Doing the dusting this morning, as I like to do once every five years or so, I paused on a 2003 issue of the now-defunct Galway magazine The Burning Bush, and noticed therein the following couplet of mine, of more than usually revolting (for me) depravity. It is called ‘Inside Out’ and I recycle it here in a spirit of the utmost disgust:

Between your arse’s two baby elephant
ears the trunk appears to have swallowed itself.

Out of this World

Like a spelling mistake
on a postcard from
a possible lover, like
the Algerian quarter
in a town where the muezzin’s
cry has never been heard,
is this suddenness,
my watch put forward
an hour we still hide
ourselves in and consume.

The sensation of tracing
two coiled melodies
at once lies heavy
on my tongue, testing
itself against and splitting
the atom of my name:
like the rules of the games
children play
by the lake shore,
impenetrable to me

and yet I watch; I follow
and cheer. It is something
to do with the weight
of your feet in my hand,
a journey not taken,
your flimsy slip-ons
abandoned and sinking
into the wet mountain clay.
Whistle to me Coltrane’s
‘Out of this World’

while I carry you home.
But there is no whistling
that tune. It is like
nothing on earth,
or not even that.
Like is not like: putting
itself to sleep, my tongue
foreswears my similes
and all their gluey works.
Do not take my hand,

language, my sweetest
downfall, now nothing
remembers its name.
Kick my hand away
and stride out into the water
while there’s a moon
to scoop up and save.
That too carry home. Be
to me like nothing on earth
or be nothing at all.

Flamborough Head

Sweeties

Saints of Seu

Stiges (You Have Me in Stiges)

Triangular Hour

The Elbow

When I fell, I fell hard.
It snapped right through. Don’t beat
yourself up over how
I beat myself purple and blue
galloping down the road
after you, but come to my aid.
Take, snap me back to myself.
It won’t hurt a bit, I know,
if you just haul me aloft,
or lie down in the road, you too.

Whydah Fools Fall in Love

What gratifying answers to my request for neologisms the other day. Moping and mooching at work today I found myself rewriting song titles to form terrible puns on bird’s names, and came up with the following ten. Any other suggestions gratefully received!

Rook Around the Clock
Grouse is the Word
Stork in the Middle with You
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Plover
Hip to be Skua
Auk on the Wild Side
Pipit on a String
Born to Wren
Kea to My Heart
Whydah Fools Fall in Love

Jane Draycott

From a short review of mine of Jane Draycott’s Over, in today’s TLS:

In the same way that the titles of the final sequence, based on the international phonetic alphabet, often have an elliptic relationship with their subject matter, ‘Zulu’ is a poem about the author’s father which proceeds entirely by negation. The long last sentence beings with a ‘Nor’ that cancels all that follows, the description of the father’s travels, and how he would return home and:

come in and play for hours
on our old Broadwood, his fingers
truly a river in spate around the house
and out into the desert of our street,
named for the small hill on which we lived.

None of this happened, in other words; but whether fictive or real, these poems are messengers bringing ‘news from another place’, in writing that is assured, sophisticated and moving.

Spoffle, Squodge, Copropody

Found these lying around the other day and thought I might recycle them. Carbon-dating on references to e.g. phone cards might convey something of their vintage. But still and all. Anyone feel like suggesting some neologisms of their own?

anaerocathedry n: inability to regain one’s seat on an airplane until refreshment trolley has got out of the way.

autoperipatism n: failure to remember where you parked the car at the airport before you went on holiday.

chumble n: hole in pocket through which change falls down and through trouser leg in public.

copropody n: act of stepping in dog dirt.

digitismus n: compulsive use of finger gestures to convey quotation marks in speech.

dillywicking n: action of beginning to undo one’s flies before entering gents’ toilet in pub.

dysflexia n: refusal of cash dispenser to return your pass card.

dyssymposia n: inability to conduct a dinner-party conversation about traffic or the price of houses.

equistructionist n: person who stands in the centre on crowded escalator.

esprit de l’ascenseur n: realization that a fart suppressed in a lift would have been silent after all (‘Au même temps que les portes se fermaient derrière lui il hésita un moment et péta. Toujours ce vieux esprit de l’ascenseur! se dit-il.’—DE CAMUVOIR.)

frigomantism n: belief that storing telephone call cards in a refrigerator recharges them.

hiott n: telephone call whose sole purpose is to inform the recipient of one’s whereabouts [acr. ‘Hi, I’m on the train.’]

johnnygodot n: tourist who waits by middle doors of Dublin bus expecting them to open at bus-stop. [St John of God’s + Godot]

moozled adj to be ~: feeling on reaching post office/bank/labour exchange counter and discovering you have been standing in the wrong queue.

Nicolepsy n: sexual arousal by television commercials for French cars.

pratcom v: to use a laptop computer in a café, pub, train or bus.

pringleton n: older male relative who will not be offended by gift of tie and/or socks for Christmas.

proxoscopy n: the feeling that you have seen a new film when you have only read the reviews.

solyksism n: extreme refusal to acknowledge power of speech to communicate with others, esp. in teenagers [‘sort of like you know’].

spoffle v: to show guests your holiday photographs after dinner.

squodge v: to urinate in sink, e.g. in rented accommodation, rather than walk down corridor to use bathroom.

stime v: to put unwanted newspaper supplements in the bin unread before opening the rest of the paper. [abbr. Sunday Times]

tedcred n: knowing at least one person who had a cameo in Father Ted.

witbetog n: job that makes you wear a name-tag. [acr. ‘Will that be to go sir?’]

'Go Long'

Formal poetry, eh. Can I still write it? I suspect not. I always feel on the verge of it abandoning me, given which sad state of affairs I take the small pre-emptive step of abandoning this new example I’ve just written, hereunder. I do think ‘Go Long’ from Joanna Newsom’s latest album is the loveliest thing I’ve heard all year though, I must say.

Go long, go longer. Linger, song,
words I hang on, echoing on,
although what song I hardly care,
any words to any old air
so long as I am lost among

the old heart rights and wrongs, heart-wrung,
light on the air as your sweet tongue.
But ‘heart’, and ‘heart-wrung’? Are you sure?
Or were you listening too hard to hear?

Whether the heart be song’s true spring
or nowhere at all, means not a thing,
drifting on the words we share.
All besides I trade, forswear,
if you too give in, borne along.
And where? I’m listening too hard to hear.

Peter Porter

Peter Porter has died. He was 81. I have exhumed and retyped (with a broken elbow, too, let me add, which I had for eleven full days before going to hospital!) – retyped, I was saying, the following review of his two-volume Collected Poems of 1999. Those volumes were intended to mark Porter’s seventieth birthday, but turned instead into dead-on-arrival funeral monuments to the OUP poetry list: the last books that imprint published, I believe.

Porter had odd views on Irish poetry, it must be said. He achieved a certain mythic, or was it urban-mythic, status for having rejected Mahon’s ‘Disused Shed’ while poetry editor at The New Statesman. Irish poetry, he thought, certainly when written by Seamus Heaney, was irretrievably mired in Georgian platitude. I think Muldoon and Carson gained a partial reprieve from this blanket condemnation, but, equally, I don’t think Porter spent overmuch time seeking out volumes by Maurice Scully or Trevor Joyce to prove himself happily wrong. It was just a pat generalisation he would trot out, repeatedly, year after year. But there is more to Porter than this. Let me not omit, too, a salute to his ailurophilia, especially in light of the heroic efforts Percy the cat has made this last hour to stop me typing the following, by sitting on the keyboard, repeatedly opening random programs (Powerpoint?) and looking up ’errrrrrr4444444445t’ in the Microsoft Word help dialogue box. And as for the poetry, here then is my review of Porter’s Collected Poems, which originally appeared in Poetry Ireland Review 62 in 1999:

In comparison to Auden and MacNeice’s Thirties, the Forties have always been seen as a poor decade for poetry. There was Dylan Thomas and his train of apocalyptic incantators, but things didn’t really pick up again until the Movement came along in the Fifties. That’s how the story usually goes, but hardly less influential (at the time at least) was the Group, of which Peter Porter was an early and prominent member. Both camps tried to drag poetry of the Forties’ slushy morass, but the Group was stridently opposed to the ‘gentility principle’ of Movement poems about country churches in neo-Augustan stanzas. For Porter and an associate like Al Alvarez, poetry was all about taking risks: it meant tackling subjects like nuclear war and being reminded of the holocaust when you saw scratch marks on the ceiling of a Tube carriage.

The young Porter is an angry poet, so angry you expect his poems to give off steam as you read them. ‘What a Lying Lot the Writers Are’ he titles a poem, before going into detail on ‘the tearing fingers of the ruck’, and his rising ‘bilge of hate’. There is something Jacobean in his indignation, as befits the author of ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, with anything smacking of upward social mobility coming in for particular ire. A frequently used symbol of decadence is a young woman marrying for money, as in ‘Made in Heaven’, whose housewife cheers herself up with:

Half a dozen lovers whose faces I can’t quite remember
(I can still start the Rose Adagio, one foot on the fender)

But at least I’m safe from everything but cancer –
The apotheosis of the young wife and the mediocre dancer.

Porters’ Sixties England is a world strangely devoid of even token rock and roll idealism: arty types in his early poems aren’t countercultural subversives, just so many cynics and lechers on the make. Larkin’s ‘Deceptions’ has taken a lot of criticism over the years for its awkward attempts to console a rape victim, but Larkin’s awkwardness is as nothing to the venom of Porter’s portrayal of a woman deciding not to lose her virginity in ‘Changes Wrung’. Sometimes Porter’s satirical manner becomes so tickled with its urbanity that it’s hard to say who or what the object of the exercise is. ‘Quatrains Dedicated to James Fenton’ is pure ‘Sweeney’-era Eliot-meets-Anthony Hecht, and none the better for it either. More enjoyable are the translations of After Martial, with their cuckolded husbands and malodorous orgiasts, their little gobbets of epigrammatic spleen. This is ribald contemporary satire at its best.

Written after the suicide of his wife, ‘An Exequy’ immediately stands out from all this banter. The Elizabethan Henry King is remembered for another poem of the same name and almost nothing else, and for Porter too this is surely his anthology piece. ‘The Easiest Room in Hell’ and ‘An Angel in Blythburgh Church’, also from The Cost of Seriousness, are uncharacteristic but fine poems on the same theme.

Porter didn’t go on being angry into middle age, or watch his poems slowly run out like Larkin’s. Instead he became a sort of millennial fabulist, toning down his persona to that of the wistful highbrow beached by the filthy modern tide. To put it in terms of Roman poets, since Porter himself so frequently does, he becomes less Martial than Horace. He has also become more productive, almost neurotically so: I can’t foresee too many readers resisting the temptation to skip a few pages along the way (and be warned, there are 788 of them). He buy his loquacity at a price: hand in glove with the Horatian pleasantries comes a hammered-home moralizing about poetry’s limitations and perfidies. As he puts it in ‘The Lying Art’:

It is all rhetoric rich as wedding cake
and promising the same bleak tears
when what was asked for but not recognised
shows its true face after a thousand breakfasts.

This, not Miss Moore’s disclaimer, tells me
why I too dislike it. It is paid to distract us,
to tell the man disappointed by his mother
that he too can be a huge cry-baby.

Too much of this becomes very tedious indeed, with its tone of woozy inconsequentialilty so familiar from late Auden. Was Porter being ‘a huge cry-baby’ when he wrote ‘An Exequy’ (separated from this by a mere four pages)? Of course not. But such is his fear of the lachrymose that he insists on planting the thought in our heads anyway. There’s only so much ground you can cut from under your feet without falling over, and Porter’s version of self-deprecation isn’t exactly slapstick fun. Opposing drippy consolation and manly restraint suits his purposes too well; if nothing else, a few embarrassing tears (or any other body fluids) might have served to lubricate the dry savannahs of volume 2. As he says in ‘Sticking to the Texts’ (ironic title, evidently): ‘Better to suffer the nightmares natural to /The body and tell what you have heard /Among your fellow-sufferers’. His best poems don’t need to prop up the tired old mind/body/art/life divides he makes so much of elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the words of ‘Sticking to the Text’ aren’t advice that he takes to heart. What he likes doing best in his recent work is playing the role of a Browning for our times. Wagner, Piero di Cosimo, Borromini, John Ford talking to T.S. Eliot, Bellini talking to Heine: the second half of Collected Poems can read like the Porter pocket guide to Western culture, with guilt, religion, sex and the decline of the West all written up in a tone of the utmost, maddening reasonablness. Late Porter, in other words, is essentially a poet of superior chitchat. His most memorable work in this vein includes ‘A Lament’, ‘A Great Reckoning in a Little Room’, ‘Bad Dreams in Venice’, ‘Woop Woop’, ‘Pisa Oscura’, ‘Copycat’, ‘The Chair of Babel’ and ‘Echt Deutsch’. But if you want something more gripping, stick to the ferocious satires and elegies in volume 1.

Jetlag

I swapped the northern for the southern ocean.
I gained and lost time, cheating it like Oisín.
Up was down. Clarity was confusion.
The words I spoke had suffered an inversion.
The brilliant light of dawn was grey and ashen.

Sweat

Saline meniscus we secrete
as our limbs wrap, knit and attune,

our rough drafts left behind on the sheet:
sealing by stretching the space between

my flank and your flank, my chest and yours,
the extra space of a liquid pinch

that comes away in our hands and pours
us out of each other, the mingled drench

we tip out through the tips of our tongues
and down the gutters of palms and spine;

the pool of us gathered by shoulders and hips
we each collect, that insists as it clings

I am your outside now and you mine:
the sweat we lick from and leave on our lips.

James Clarence Mangan, 'Iceland Moss-Tea'

(...) Where, from the mountain’s furnace-lair,
From thousand smoke-enveloped cones,
Colossal blocks of red-hot stones
Are night by night uphurled in air –

(Like blood-red Saga-birds of yore)
While o’er the immeasurable snows
A sea of burning resin flows
Bubbling like molten metal ore –

Where from the Jokuls to the strand
The dimmed eye turns from smoke and steam
Only to track some sulphur-stream
That seethes along the blasted land –

Where clouds lie black on cinder-piles,
And all night long the lone Seal moans,
As, one by one, the mighty stones
Fall echoing down on far-off isles –

Where, in a word, hills vomit flame,
And storms for ever lash the sea,
There sprang this bitter moss for me,
Thence this astringent potion came.

Return of Keats and Chapman

‘Tell me’, Chapman asked Keats after their Thursday evening cribbage game and over a particularly fine amontillado, ‘would you describe yourself as a remorseless person?’
‘I would.’
‘A person who does not feel the need to apologise or make excuses for things you have done?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Like that time you tickled Dryden in the eye?’
‘If by “tickled” you mean “punched” and by “that time” you mean “repeatedly” then yes.’
‘Indeed. And to what do you attribute this character trait?’
‘My collection of stuffed birds, a mere several hundred of which you see in this very room. My blue-footed boobies, hairy woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers...’
‘I see.’
‘There is however one species that has served me better than all others in this regard.’
‘Go on.’
‘Its power derives not just from the species but the location where my specimens were found.’
‘That being?’
‘A riverbank in County Tipperary.’
‘Fascinating’.
‘Large white birds, of heron-like appearance.’
‘Remarkable.’
‘Too right.’
‘And they are?’
‘I have Nore egrets.’

Icelandic Ash Cloud Reported 'In Discussions with Agents', Holding Out For Sandra Bullock in Role of 'Inconvenienced Ryanair Passenger'

The frothing caress cast in fractured syntax!

I do like car ferries, I must say: anywhere the 70s haven’t stopped happening yet is all right by me. Escaping the pestilence of Icelandic volcanic ash this morning, which had grounded my flight on Thursday, I found myself queuing for breakfast behind a supersized scouser still in her pyjama bottoms and finishing off a Bacardi breezer from the night before. Bullet-headed lorry drivers sprawled in postures of Brueghelesque repose or held forth on Man City team-selections this season, a tad too excitedly for the hour that was in it, I thought (five in the morning, for God’s sake). I was in Dublin for the presentation of a tribute book to my old professor, Terence Brown. It’s called Twelve by Two for Terence and has some very fine things in it, I must say. I saluted him then, and do so again now. His appreciation of having me back may have dipped slightly during a certain ‘musical’ interlude over dinner, but bygones now, bygones. I was also able to pick up a copy of Icarus LX·MMX while I was over, a celebration of sixty years of that publication, which rifles (or do I mean ‘riffles’?) their back catalogue for a collection of hits, misses and outright horrors (that would be me, with a risible attempt from 1988 – ‘Purpose and place are blent /when the sundial is damp with the first dew still’, forsooth). Michael Longley’s often repeated tales of his Trinity salad days get a fresh telling here, mentioning, among other things, how he took a poem published in Icarus in 1960 and reworked it for his 2004 collection Snow Water. That’s enviable. I contribute a short piece on editing the magazine myself, which I reproduce below, though as you’ll see I largely take refuge in tales of our amusing little mishaps. My Trinity roots have given me much, but I find I combine my returns to them with a morbid nervousness of origins, and much grand-standing superstition about and fear of the past (though maybe the extremeness of my reactions just confirms how childish I remain, twenty years on). Because you can’t go back, really, you can never go back! Having said that, I notice with amusement that my name at least has never gone away, since it is still on the door of house 25, where I used to live.

Here’s that piece then. The picture above is of Birkenhead at dawn.

‘Author’s name lost’: hardly the most confidence-inspiring of bylines, but there it is on page 29 of Icarus 91, under a poem called ‘Outside Mass’ (‘On Easter moss, delicate and moist...’). The covering letter that holds the key to this mystery is, I presume, lodged down the back of a sofa or filing cabinet somewhere in the upstairs room in House 6 where I edited, which is to say flung together, three issues of that magazine in the academic year 1989-9. These were still the days of camera-ready copy. Laser-printed pages were gummed down and delivered to a printer behind Mahaffy’s pub on Pearse Street. Our sales figures are not recorded.

Contributors were recruited in a haphazard way. One of our illustrators was a copiously-bearded man named Hugh reputed to live in a large pipe in the Booterstown bird sanctuary. An interview with Seamus Heaney was bagged after a T.S. Eliot centenary lecture he gave to the Phil. May O’Flaherty of Parsons Bookshop reminisced on bygone bohemian days (Liam O’Flaherty ‘must have been the least civil person I have ever come across’), while self-styled ‘master of the universe’ Aidan Walsh offered a blueprint for bohemian times to come (‘Anyone who wants to play in my band can write to me and send donations or whatever’, an invitation that for all I know still stands).

Typos abounded. Issue 93 carries an article on a Russian film director referred to throughout as ‘Tartovsky’. Opportunities for monkey business were gratefully seized. I bastardized a poem of Henri Michaux’s about icebergs into English under the moniker ‘Harry Mitchell’. Among our other contributors was a bunch of my mates from Presentation College, Bray, whose names I purloined for a spot of heteronymic mischief: they know who they are. Another victim of these ventriloquistic high jinks I can name was Fearghal McGarry, now a distinguished historian and former TCD lecturer, then an employee of Fogarty’s sweet shop near the Dart station in Bray. Icarus 93 records him as the author of the deathless couplet, ‘I bite the head and survey the ooze. /Frail jellybaby, my truncated muse.’ Try telling me books about the Spanish Civil War or Eoin O’Duffy top that. Directly under this we find another couplet, this one titled ‘1989’: ‘The frothing caress cast in fractured syntax! /Come let us immerse our hopeful satieties.’ That was probably my idea of a chat-up line too, at the time.

The closing poem of my last issue, ‘To Be a Sperm’, I pass over without comment. My pages may as well have come with scratch-and-sniff Biactol inserts, anyone reading them today might think. That’s all cleared up now, as Woody Allen says on the phone in one of his films to a long-ago college girlfriend, and while the experience may induce its share of squirms twenty years on, it’s one I’m very glad to have had. No matter the bemusement or indifference with which the ‘expensive delicate ship’ of university life sailed past its theatrical splash, Icarus remains a compelling bright spot in the canvas of my Trinity years.

Scorborough, East Dalton, Lockington

Why would there be a very dead rabbit five feet up a tree impersonating a Francis Bacon screaming pope? A question I had reason to ponder this afternoon in a wood outside Lockington here in East Yorks. I’d seen red kites dawdling overhead earlier in the afternoon. Would they take rabbits? Might a red kite (or if not, what) have taken one and dropped it by mistake? Or on purpose (à la shrike)? A quick google search finds accounts of dead rabbits spotted twenty feet up trees, which might tax the ingenuity of even the local satanist/ wax-jacketed oaf fraternity. Anyone who might the answer, speak.

Note bullfinch in branches. There was also a small bird in the hedegrows whose song I can only compare to a walkie-talkie or some kind of phone signal. And again, o ye knowledgeable ones, speak.

And is that a fieldfare (going by the grey neck)? Or am I getting that completely wrong?

‘Scorborough’. Don’t you love saying that. It’s an east-coast seaside town pronounced in a Dart (‘Dort’) accent, evidently. Or a hamlet on the road to Driffield. Take your pick!

Maria Johnston

I mentioned Maria Johnston’s chucklesome article ‘Reading Irish Poetry in the New Century: Poetry Ireland Review 2000-2009’ the other day. Poetry Ireland have now put it online here.

And as chance would have it, once again, the author is speaking here in Hull next Monday, on ‘The “Effetest Fop of Formalist Poetry?”: Modern and Contemporary Rondeaux’ (Graduate Seminar Room, University of Hull, Monday 12 April, 4.30pm).

Trevor Joyce

From a very brief review by me of Trevor Joyce's Courts of Air and Earth in this week’s TLS:

These poems take their place alongside Ciaran Carson’s version of the Táin and Vona Groarke’s of Lament for Art O’Leary as notable recent acts of translation from Ireland’s constitutional first language. Joyce’s style throughout is characteristically astringent and unadorned. Courts of Air and Earth is an exemplary act of reimagining and recovery.

{Ends}

And as chance would have it, Trevor Joyce is reading here in Hull next week. Staff House, University of Hull, Tuesday 13 April, 7pm.

I’ll see you there.

Auto Da Fé

I was very surprised indeed, on finally getting to read the PIR 100 article mentioned here, to see that the poem of mine noted therein is one that’s not in any of my books and which, in fact, I’d forgotten I’d even written. As I’m currently trying to finalize a contents page for another book, and find myself sitting knee-deep in discarded and rejected poems, I am reminded of how many of these things I’ve racked up over the years. I see Todd Swift mentioned the other day, in between copious references to the Feast of the Crucifixion of the Easter Bunny or whatever the festival is that Christians are currently celebrating (and how nice to see the Irish Catholic Church able to take time off the other day from its busy schedule of abetting child rapists to denounce the sinful practice of consuming alcohol of Good Friday), sorry, where was I, mentioned his hope that someone might be interested in publishing a Best Of his blog; so maybe I too should place a small advertisement for myself here, on condition that the book in question be called The Worst of Me: Rejected Poems. For instance, there is the rake of Projective-y poems I am obliged to write ever time a full moon falls on a Friday 13. But then there are quite normal poems too, like this one I noticed recently. And as it mentions black cats I thought we might have a picture of the patron and overseer of all domestic literary production to go with it. Monorail kitteh currently experiencing slight delays on the line, but hopes to resume normal service shortly, I think he is telling us. And now here is the poem, ‘Auto Da Fé’:

That Alice Kyteler have her revenge –
vengeance for her witch’s fiery death –
St Canice’s Cathedral is swarming with
black cats familiarly making strange:

hundreds of black cats with burning eyes
upsetting the round tower’s vats of boiling oil,
fouling graves and altars, sworn to chill
the wine of Christ’s own blood to burning ice.

For coupling with the devil himself you stand
condemned, our ardent heretic, to burn,
putting to shame the heaven never ours

to lose and the fires of hell you laugh to scorn:
abashing us beyond your wildest curse
changed to a black cat, eating from my hand.

Rumbled at Last